Strategies in Afghanistan: Are we done yet? After 8 years, not even close

View full sizeThe Associated PressAn Afghan man cycles past an election poster of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul in early September.By MERRILL McPEAK

What we are trying to do in Iraq is hard. We were reminded of this two weekends ago, when al-Qaida blew up key government buildings in Baghdad and killed at least 155 people. Of course, al-Qaida in Iraq did not exist before we invaded the place. Whatever you may think of Saddam Hussein, he had al-Qaida under control. His removal by us illustrates how all actions in the Middle East bring into effect the law of unintended consequences.

But just about every way you can judge the size of a problem, Afghanistan -- for good reason called the "Graveyard of Empires" -- is tougher than Iraq. In area, Afghanistan is huge, not just bigger then Iraq, but bigger than Italy and Germany combined. There are more Afghans than Iraqis, and they do not have a lot to lose. Albania has a bigger economy, unless you count illicit drug traffic. And the country is landlocked, so logistic support, one of our principal military competencies, is much more difficult and expensive.

View full sizePakistan and Iran are included in the table on this page because we have issues with both countries and some have argued for being more assertive in dealing with them. The raw numbers leave aside military complications like Pakistan's atomic weaponry or Iran's near-term nuclear potential. Even so, the factors of geography and population size show how a fight with either would likely pose problems even more difficult than the ones we face today in Afghanistan.

In other words, maybe we were lucky taking on Iraq, it being by comparison such an easy problem.

The issue on President Barack Obama's desk just now is how to respond to the request by our commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to greatly expand our military presence there. To review the bidding, at the end of calendar 2008, our troop strength in Afghanistan was just under 40,000. In February and March, the White House announced 30,000 more troops would be deployed, bringing us to around 70,000 in the country by the end of this year.

McChrystal has asked for another big jump, the details not yet public, but perhaps as many as 40,000. McChrystal also wants to increase the size of the Afghan army to 240,000 and of the police to 160,000, meaning there would be an Afghan soldier or police officer for every 85 people in the country, plus whatever combat troops and advisers we and our NATO allies put in. The president has been criticized for thinking about whether he should approve McChrystal's request -- "dithering," as former Vice President Dick Cheney put it. But the president seems intent on asking questions that have needed answers for some time:

What are we trying to do in this part of the world? How long will it take? What will it cost in men and money? As a practical matter, how do we judge whether we're getting it right?

None of the answers is easy, even if we could wall off Afghanistan and consider its problems in isolation. Say our objective is to build democratic structures there, including not only testing the popular will through honest elections -- though that's important and doesn't seem to be going well -- but also such items as a market-based economy, an independent judiciary, a flourishing education system, and protection for ethnic and religious minorities. We have no reason to think a large standing army and police force will help perpetuate such structures. History shows quite the reverse is true, a fact our Founding Fathers appreciated.

But, maybe democracy building is too much to expect for now in Afghanistan. Perhaps we should settle for the stability of an autocratic regime, like the one we recently displaced in Iraq. This is just the sort of debate the president is refereeing now, and I don't envy him the job because, even at the first level of detail, we'll find that problems in Afghanistan cannot be considered in isolation.

For instance, a look at the map shows we probably can't win in Afghanistan without help from Pakistan, or Iran, or both. Pakistan seems at last to be helping, though more because the Taliban overplayed its hand than through any cleverness on our part. One of the major ironies of our intervention in Afghanistan is that Iran was very helpful in the beginning. They didn't like the Taliban any better than we did. We put an end to their cooperation by assigning Iran to an "axis of evil," an amateur mistake we're now trying to wriggle out of.

So, security issues in the Middle East are all connected. What we decide to do anywhere affects what we are trying to do everywhere. It's not merely complex, it's three-dimensional chess, except with a different player in control at each level. I'm a little pessimistic about our prospects in Afghanistan -- would not know how to counsel the president on finding a path to success.

But here are some smaller pieces of advice, snippets that could be useful at the margins, or in the future:

The key military capability in any counter insurgency is intelligence, by which I mean identifying the right targets. The problem used to be hitting a target, but now we can hit whatever we like, and hit it quickly and precisely, so the problem is to make sure it's the right target. We've bombed at least two Afghan wedding parties, killing 70 civilians, many of them children, not helpful in a battle for "hearts and minds." By the way, if we want more reliable intelligence, we'd better start studying Farsi.

Play to our strengths. The insurgents have available for use only one tactic: short range, ground combat. They have to get close and slug it out. The tactic can be quite effective (ask General Custer), and we should refuse to cooperate. Let's stay out of the clinches, jab and move. They can't touch us if we put primary reliance on long range, precision attack. By the way, some Army officers, themselves trained in close combat, have difficulty with this idea, suggesting we should look at putting a Navy or Air Force officer in charge.

It's a world of timing. Just as short-range, close combat is the insurgents' only tactic, the most important strategic factor working for them is time. Whatever we wanted to do in Afghanistan, we've been at it for more than eight years. We should be done by now.

Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak was Air Force chief of staff, 1990-94. He lives in Lake Oswego.